Amazon Fire TV Is a Great Living-Room Companion

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Amazon Fire TV

Amazon Fire TV

Amazon launched into the video-hardware business with a set-top device called Amazon Fire TV for $99, a small flat box with a remote control.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Interface

The Fire TV allows you to stream from various services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus and YouTube. However, users are unable to access HBO Go.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Features

Among its features is a predictive engine called "ASAP," which pre-loads content it thinks you are going to watch, so it can start without any buffering or load time. This feature learns over time, and gets better at suggesting content you like.

Image: Mashable Christina Ascani

Hardware

It comes with a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and a dedicated GPU for gaming purposes.

Image: Mashable Christina Ascani

Voice Activation

The Internet-connected set-top box uses voice search when you speak into the remote. It aims to take away the frustrations of scrolling and clicking for letters on an alphabet grid to find content.

Image: Mashable Christina Ascani

Voice Activation

Image: Mashable Christina Ascani

Gaming

In a big move, the Fire TV also serves as a gaming console and offers titles such as Minecraft, The Walking Dead and Monsters University; many are free or as low as $1.85 to play.

Image: Mashable Christina Ascani

Smartphone/Tablet Controllers

Apps for the smartphone and tablet allow users to play games on the Fire TV.

Image: Mashable Christina Ascani

Gaming Controller

An additional gaming controller is available for $39.

Image: Mashable Christina Ascani

Is Amazon's Fire TV the ultimate living-room device? It's not perfect, but it certainly has potential.

Amazon unveiled its Fire TV set-top box on Wednesday to a market already crowded with players, both big and small. The company's goal with Fire TV is not to merely compete with the likes of Roku and Apple, but also to bring its full ecosystem of content, including games, to the living room.

In a lot of ways, Fire TV is everything Google TV should have been, but wasn't. Yes, Google TV was supposed to integrate with live TV, but that never worked well. Instead, Fire TV is a great example of bringing the world of mobile apps and games to television in a way that makes sense, and is easy to use.

So, does Fire TV live up to the hype? We've spent a few days putting the $99 device through its paces.

Design and Specs

Amazon did a terrific job with the design of the Fire TV. The box itself is square, nondescript and remarkably thin. Unlike the Apple TV and Roku 3, the Fire TV doesn't have curved edges — this thing is sharp — but the overall look is sleek and discreet.

Although the Fire TV is small and thin (its height is about the diameter of a dime, around three-quarters of an inch), it has more heft in it than you may expect. The Fire TV isn't heavy, per se, but you can definitely tell that Amazon has packed tons of stuff into this box.

Amazon is really hyping the power of the Fire TV, focusing on its quad-core processor and "dedicated" GPU. During the company's presentation, I remarked that the Fire TV was basically a Kindle Fire HDX tablet without the screen.

The Fire TV has a Snapdragon 600 SoC (system on chip), which includes an Ardeno 320 GPU, a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. This is the same chipset used in the Galaxy S4 and the 2013 HTC One. This isn't quite as high-end as the Snapdragon 800 found in the Kindle Fire HDX, but it's considerably more powerful than any of the other current crop of set-top box/low-cost gaming systems on the market.

From a specs perspective, the only aspect that feels limiting about the Fire TV is its internal storage. The Fire TV has 8GB of flash storage, which can be used to store games and other apps. This will be fine for most users, but if you find yourself using the Fire TV to play lots of games, we can see 8GB getting filled up very, very quickly. I'll discuss this in-depth later on, but some games can be over 1GB, which means it would be possible to fill up the Fire TV with under 10 games installed.

In a perfect world, the Fire TV would have an SD or microSD slot to make it easy to expand storage.

In terms of ports, the Fire TV is fully loaded. It has an HDMI port, optical audio output and Ethernet. There is also a USB 2.0 port, although that isn't enabled to do anything at the moment, except for debugging and interfacing in developer mode. Like the Apple TV and Roku 3, the Fire TV is HDMI only, so if you have an older TV without an HDMI port, it won't work.

Setup

Setting up the Fire TV is remarkably simple. Plug the 13-watt power adaptor into the unit, connect it to an HDMI cable (not included), put batteries in the included remote and that's it.

There is no power button on the device. To turn it off, unplug it from the wall or the power adaptor.

Once the unit is on, it will search for the Bluetooth remote. If it doesn't find it after a few seconds, the on-screen menu helpfully explains what to press on the remote to get things paired.

Once paired, the next step is to walk through the setup process. Although Amazon has made a big deal out of its voice search, and how the Fire TV removes the need to hunt and peck to enter information, when it comes to setting up your Wi-Fi network, you have to do just that. The Fire TV does support Wi-Fi Direct, so if your router has that feature enabled, you can set up with less fuss. Otherwise, yes, you will need to enter in your password using an on-screen keyboard.

Setting up the Fire TV is a snap.

For both wired and wireless connections, users can alter the IP, gateway and DNS address; so if you have some specific networking needs, the Fire TV is surprisingly robust.

When you buy a Fire TV, it can come pre-registered to your Amazon account; this means that as soon as the unit boots up, it has access to your purchased or rented Amazon videos, is tied to your Amazon credit card and can plug into Amazon Cloud Drive photos.

If you don't have an Amazon Prime subscription, you can get a free 30-day trial. It's worth noting, however, that the Fire TV is really designed around Prime Instant and Amazon's ecosystem in general.

Voice Search: Great When You Can Use It

One of the hallmark features of the Fire TV is its innovative voice search. This isn't the first time we've seen voice search in the living room; the original Kinect for Xbox 360 had it, and it's a prominent feature on the Xbox One. However, this is the first time we've seen voice search integrated into a device at the Fire TV's price point.

Use voice search by holding down a microphone button on the Bluetooth remote, and saying your search selection out loud. Release the button, and a search takes place.

Voice recognition is good on the Fire TV — I very rarely found myself having to repeat my phrase or search query — but it's not perfect. Still, it was reliable enough to use as a primary search method.

In addition to searching for titles of movies and TV shows, you can search for actors, directors and genres. Searching for "Oscar winners," for instance, will bring up films such as The Silence of the Lambs, while searching for cop shows brings up NYPD Blue.

Want to search the Fire TV? Just talk to it.

If content is available on another service, you can select a "More Ways to Watch" button to see other viewing options for a show. Here's the problem: Right now, the only other service supported by voice search is Hulu Plus.

If I search for Scandal, for example, I see the episodes available on Amazon Instant and Hulu Plus. The problem is that Amazon's episodes aren't available for free. Netflix, however, has the first two seasons of Scandal available for free, but that does not come up in my voice search.

Amazon said it wants to work with all content providers to bring their content to voice search, but for now, it's really only designed to work with Amazon content. That's a shame because a unified search option — using voice or not — is something sorely needed. Roku has done a lot to integrate unified search into its software in recent builds. The Xbox One and TiVo Roamio have great unified search features too.

For now, voice search is great, but it's not universal, which means you'll still need to hunt and peck in other apps and in other parts of the system.

Third-Party Services

The Fire TV is based on Android, albeit a customized version similar to what Amazon uses for the Kindle Fire HDX tablets.

As a result, all of the third-party services and apps are actually Android apps running on the TV; this means Netflix, Hulu Plus, Crackle, Pandora and others are actually Android apps. I mention this because although the Android interface usually works well for a 10-foot experience, it isn't as good as the HTML5 version of those services for other set-top box and Internet TVs.

Netflix, for example, has a really great HTML5 interface that runs on Roku, certain Blu-ray players, and the PlayStation 3 and 4. That experience is, in my mind, superior to the Android app blown up to fit a big screen.

I'm being really nitpicky here, however, because third-party services work as expected. What's more, out of the box, Amazon has a great selection of third-party services, including nearly every major video service in North America. The one exception is HBO Go. HBO Go is available on Roku, Apple TV, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and several other devices. Fire TV supports Showtime Anytime, but not HBO Go. That said, the Android nature of the device means that bringing support for other services should be simple.

The Amazon Fire TV also supports third-party apps such as Hulu Plus.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

It's important to note that because content channels tend to be siloed, voice search does not work within those apps, and there isn't a unified way to view content or playlists from across various services. To me, that would be the only thing Amazon could do to upgrade the experience.

Watching content from other services proved solid. I found Netflix buffered a bit more on the Fire TV than on my Roku 3 or Apple TV, but I haven't had enough time to do extensive tests to investigate the cause.

With Hulu Plus, I did have some issues playing back some content in the app. Felicity wouldn't play back on the Fire TV, but it worked fine on an iPad, Roku 3, Apple TV and Chromecast. That was the only show that gave me issues, and I've reported the problem to both Amazon and Hulu Plus.

Games

Streaming content aside, the real differentiator with the Fire TV is that it is also a bonafide game machine. No, the Fire TV doesn't compete with the likes of an Xbox One or PlayStation 4, but Ouya, GameStick and other Android-based game devices should be worried. Very worried.

Games for the Fire TV are Android ports from the Amazon Appstore modified to work well on a large screen, and with a game controller or the Amazon remote.

The Bluetooth game controller doesn't come with the Fire TV, but is available for $39.99; this price includes 1,000 Amazon coins to use toward buying games or in-app purchases. Other Bluetooth controllers will work with the Fire TV, as well, including models from Moga.

The Amazon Fire TV game controller is available for $39.99

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Amazon can't guarantee that every Bluetooth Android controller will work with the Fire TV, but the company isn't doing anything overtly proprietary in what it supports. I think that's really fantastic, especially for existing Moga owners. We'll test more Bluetooth controllers with the Fire TV in the future, and post our results.

Up to four controllers can be connected to the Fire TV at once, but I only played with one controller connected.

As for the controller itself, it's nice. While it's not as perfect as an Xbox 360/Xbox One controller (what is?), it feels good in the hand. The buttons are responsive, the analog sticks are solid and I noticed no discernible input lag when playing games on the TV.

The controller can also control the Fire TV itself, so you can use it to easily make your way around the general entertainment console.

As for the number of compatible games, Amazon has a large list that will only continue to grow.

Playing Asphalt 8, Gameloft's racing game, on the big screen was a pure joy. Sev Zero is a new exclusive Fire TV game from Amazon Game Studios that is part tower defense, part first-person shooter. It's a ton of fun, and a great way to show off the power of the Fire TV.

The Fire TV plays Minecraft. Well.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Other games, including Telltale Games' fantastic The Walking Dead, look great on the system.

That said, games "optimized" for the controller work don't work as well as you might expect. Crazy Taxi is one of my favorite games of all time (I love the mobile version on iOS and Android). I was so excited to play it on the big screen, but the experience was incredibly disappointing. Although the controller works with the game, switching from drive to reverse requires some on-screen toggling before the sticks will work well. The controller support was added in such a way that made me think Sega didn't put a lot of time into it.

I'm a forgiving customer who doesn't mind that my $4.99 purchase (for a game I've already bought four times if you include Dreamcast, Xbox 360, iOS and Android) had a less-than-stellar controller experience, but I can see a lot of users getting frustrated by situations like that.

I urge game developers to ensure their games work well with the Fire TV controller — don't just do a quick remapping job.

Storage Woes

Downloading some of the larger games, including Asphalt 8, means that it's very easy to fill up the 8GB of internal storage on the Fire TV. It's also easy to uninstall games from the Fire TV, but I think that the more people use the Fire TV as a place to play games, the less they will want to uninstall them.

I'm confident that its limited storage and lack of microSD or SD was because Amazon needed to keep costs down. That's perfectly acceptable and for most users, won't be a major issue. Still, I hope some solution — be it adding external USB support or some sort of cloud-play option for select games — is in the works.

I harp on the storage point only because I do think Amazon has something really special with the Fire TV. This is the first commercial product I've seen that can bring the casual mobile-gaming experience to television.

One of the biggest challenges facing Ouya and others like it is getting a good selection of AAA games from big developers in a storefront that people can trust. Amazon solves that problem, while also having the resources to invest in its own gaming brand.

Who Is This For?

The Fire TV's dashboard.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Some of the negative reviews on Amazon.com for the Fire TV lament the lack of access to local media files and the inability to connect to an external USB device. To those users, I say: I understand your frustration (although Plex for Android is available and that's one solution), but the Fire TV isn't being billed as that type of device.

The Fire TV has the potential to be tweaked, hacked and customized beyond any other major streaming box on the market, but it is very clearly meant for people who want to enjoy streaming content from a variety of services, along with the ability to play games on their television. The Fire TV achieves those goals beautifully, especially at $99

Amazon Fire TV

The Good

Great content selection • Can play games well • Competitive $99 price

The Bad

Voice search only works with Amazon content • Not all games are optimized well for the controller • Content support nonexistent for non-U.S. users

The Bottom Line

The Amazon Fire TV brings all of the company's content ecosystem to the living room for just $99. This is what Google TV should have been.

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